Tag Archives: survivors

Putting Lawyers First: Will the Child Sex Abuse Inquiry really benefit survivors?

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New Zealand dame Justice Lowell Goddard : Putting lawyers first pic credit: http://www.teara.govt.nz/

New Zealand dame Justice Lowell Goddard : Putting lawyers first pic credit: http://www.teara.govt.nz/

The extraordinary disclosure reported on the Exaro website and in The Sunday Times today that the Goddard Judicial inquiry into child sexual abuse will recruit a record number of in-house QCs and lawyers raises  more than just a few eyebrows.

It appears that Ben Emmerson, the QC who survived the cull that abolished the independent panel, will be interviewing for 20 more barristers – ten of them QC’s – this month This far outstrips the number employed for the Leveson inquiry into the press or the very long running Saville Inquiry into the  Northern Ireland ” Bloody Sunday ” atrocity.

It is not surprising that survivors – already excluded from the panel and any meaningful input into the proceedings – have reacted with fury. If you also take into account that every organisation from the police to local government, the security services to Whitehall and ministers, would want to bring along their own QC at public expense, you can see where the phrase ” lawyer fest” comes from.

And you have to add that most of the remaining shrunk panel are also lawyers or connected to the law. The remaining people are  Alexis Jay, author of the report last year on CSA in Rotherham; Drusilla Sharpling, barrister and former senior prosecutor; Malcolm Evans, professor of public international law; and Ivor Frank, barrister and advisor to the Home Office..Only Alexis Jay is not connected to the law.

If you compare the Goddard panel with the former Hillsborough Panel and the Gosport Independent Panel (I declare an interest I am a member) and you can see how the members come from diverse backgrounds with different interests. They are not predominately lawyers.

True it is clear that  Emmerson has asked for a wide range of legal expertise including specialists in child care, local authorities, public law and criminal law.But that is not the same as having a mix of people with different experience away from the law courts.

Indeed the whole process could end up as  being an intimidatory experience for any survivor wishing to give evidence.

Ben Emmerson: A Thomas Cromwell figure? Pic Credit: UN

Ben Emmerson: A Thomas Cromwell figure?
Pic Credit: UN

There is also a question about Emmerson himself. He is a very well-regarded human rights lawyer but he is also ( according to past members of the panel ) an arrogant and bombastic figure who might well create division rather than the healing process needed in such a sensitive area.

His powers of patronage are large and he appears to be creating his own Empire  Indeed in another century  a parallel could be drawn with Thomas Cromwell  – a brilliant lawyer and advocate for Henry VIII  (read Hilary Mantel’s excellent novels) who wielded enormous patronage. He ended up being beheaded for heresy and treason on Tower Hill. I am not suggesting such an ISIS style modern fate for Emmerson but the way this has been done suggests he is acting as a Cromwell type figure to Lady Goddard and Theresa May. His solutions may not be the right ones and one would not want  the inquiry to be not trusted as a result.

The other inquiries have  one public aim – putting the families involved first. The parallel aim for the Goddard Inquiry should be to put the survivors at the centre of its work. At the moment it is looking like that it is putting lawyers first – and  if lawyers are not careful, they will seen  by survivors ( if they have not already said so) as exploiting survivors for their own personal careers.,

Esther Baker child sex abuse allegations: A challenging case for Staffordshire Police

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Esther Baker

Esther Baker

The allegations of historical child sex abuse made by Esther Baker are going to be a big challenge for Staffordshire Police to investigate.

Her testimony  reported first on Sky News and developed in stories published at the weekend on Exaro News and in the Sunday Mirror make grim reading. I won’t repeat it all here.

What it suggests is that some 25 years ago a group of young girls – in Esther’s case as young as six – were taken into the deep woods of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire and  raped on numerous occasions  while a couple of police officers watched to make sure no member of the public stumbled upon such a scene.

She has been unable to identify any of the other girls – though she says they may have been six or seven of them and not all the same ones – and has until recently not been certain who all the assailants were. Some were alleged to VIPs, others were not.

But she has now told police that a former MP of repeatedly raping her not only there but at other places. He  is adamant that this is untrue and  insists that she has either fabricated this  or been manipulated by others to accuse him of criminal sexual acts he did not commit.

She points out to me that the first time she made the allegation it was to another survivor and was before she was being counselled by any organisation.

Staffordshire Police are at the moment nearing the end of a scoping exercise which has involved interviewing Esther seven times for hours before they proceed to a full investigation which  they have promised to undertake.

What has also emerged that quite independently two other women have come forward and made similar allegations against the same former MP. Unlike Esther these two women have not made their complaints public and still have to talk to Staffordshire Police in any detail about their allegations. Neither are known to Esther.

And to add to the complications a third survivor,  a man already talking to the Met Police, about allegations in Dolphin Square, London has identified from a picture of Esther as a child, her being there. She remembers being taken to London but had no idea where she had been taken.

All this is going to require a painstaking detailed investigation by Staffordshire Police which is going to take a lot of time and energy. It is a very good exemplar of how these allegations – which would have been dismissed years ago – are now being taken seriously by the police in the present climate. No doubt the naysayers would argue that these allegations  still should not be taken up because they sound so extreme.

But to clear up what looks like a hidden epidemic of child sex abuse that is being uncovered in this country Esther is entitled to a full and thorough investigation into exactly what happened in Staffordshire 25 years ago. And the police need to  track down  who is alleged to have carried out  such vile acts and bring them to trial.

Michael Mansfield QC Launches Judicial Review Of CSA Inquiry.

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Interesting comment from theneedleblog on Michael Mansfield’s bid for a judicial review of the Goddard Inquiry.
Sadly if this had remained an independent panel there would have been no bar to appointing survivors to serve on it. I warned this could happen but some survivors took no notice.
Also it is not well known that it is coalition policy to try and appoint an investigative journalist to work alongside other experts on independent panels. I should know because as a result of this policy I am currently serving alongside health and police experts on the Gosport War Memorial Hospital independent inquiry which is trying to get to the bottom of a series of unexplained historical deaths of elderly people at that hospital stretching for nearly two decades.

gojam's avatartheneedleblog

Here is the full press release. I’ll comment below.

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The Chambers of Michael Mansfield QC supports the Survivors’ two grounds of judicial review. Firstly, that the Survivors of Sexual Abuse are excluded from membership of the Inquiry panel because of a claim that they will lack the necessary objectivity. It should be noted that this bar to membership of the panel in fact only targets Survivors who have disclosed their abuse; this of course serves only to punish and stigmatise Survivors.

Secondly, that the Victims and Survivors Consultative Panel (VSCP) involvement is so limited as to be meaningless. The VSCP was said to have been created to allow Survivors to participate at the centre of this Inquiry. Instead the VSCP will meet with the Inquiry team on two days per month and not have access to the Inquiry papers. Each of these decisions sidelines the participation of the Survivors. As…

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Child Sex Abuse Inquiry: Survivors should unite not fight

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The future of the current child sex abuse inquiry reaches a  ” make or break ” moment this Wednesday. On that day it will either be wound up or reinvented.

What has particularly depressed me about the whole business is the way it has been handled. The Home Office, in particular, has not covered itself in glory – recommending two chairs that had to resign – and with a new chair still to be appointed months after the inquiry was originally set up.

What started with great hopes when seven MPs of opposing parties got together to ask Theresa May, the home secretary, to set this up has ended in despair with people quarrelling with each other on-line, demanding resignations  of panel members and refusing to co-operate or attend listening events.

I don’t think people realise what a mean feat it is – thanks to the open-mindedness of Tory Mp, Zac Goldsmith- to get together  seven MPs from four parties with opposing views- Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green – and get them to agree to press an initially reluctant government to set up the overarching inquiry in the first place.

The MPs have frankly not followed the ” yah boo ” script of scoring political points off each other – and tried to take the issue out of party politics. The Opposition has also rightly tempered its criticism of Theresa May in Parliament  when it would be easy to score cheap points from her discomfort as the debacle unfolded. They recognised she was genuinely committed to the inquiry- and respected that.

I wish I could say the same for some of the survivors and professionals but I can’t. By all means have a lively, rational debate on what is to be done and try to convince others of your case. But to descend into demanding people are removed from a panel, banned from attending meetings ( as the Survivors Alliance wants) or to claim that your view is what every one of the probably millions of survivors want is both arrogant and wrong.

You can change people’s minds. I originally thought it would be better to have a non statutory inquiry after the success of Hillsborough. I now think it should have statutory powers because of the issues it is dealing with – and the fact it has to tackle very powerful people whose instinct will be to want to cover  everything up.

However they are lots of ways to run a statutory inquiry. The simplest one is to scrap the existing panel replace it with a judge, employ phalanxes of highly paid lawyers and hold judicial style hearings where witnesses are cross-examined in public. This means it  will be transparent but survivors will have to face cross-examination even if their hearing is in private. It will also mean that the judge – and the judge alone – will decide what the report will say. And I am afraid the history on this is not good – with  findings often at odds with the evidence presented – take Hutton and Leveson for starters. Or more pertinently, take the Waterhouse inquiry into North Wales child sexual abuse, which is now having to be reviewed. Also statutory inquiries can be delayed and delayed  as lawyers argue about their findings – as is the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War for example,

Survivors will be confined to giving their evidence in this model -but the judge will decide whether to believe them.

The other way to do this is to combine the present panel with a judge and work in a collegiate way. Here survivors not only give evidence but alongside other professional people – have an input into what the report will say. They are real participants.

Just a moment. Isn’t this what we have got already? Yes it is, we have a panel of  experts who can tackle the issue and understand child sexual abuse. So why throw the whole thing out and start again.

Now it is clear from an article I have written with Mark Watts in Exaro today that while some survivors  and professionals have told Theresa May the whole inquiry has to be scrapped other survivors who have attended the listening events in London and Manchester passionately want it to continue. And I don’t understand why the people who want it scrapped seem to want to deny the people who want it to continue any voice. Particularly as some of them have turned down invitations to attend.

Isn’t it  about time that survivors tried  to work with each other rather than undermine each other?

Child Sex Abuse Inquiry Debacle: Why it is important where we go next

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Today (mon) home secretary Theresa May, will face a barrage of criticism in Parliament for her office’s failure to twice find a suitable person to chair the much needed historic child sex abuse inquiry

Losing not one chair but  two – Baroness Butler Sloss and Fiona Woolf – because of potential conflicts of interest in a matter of weeks smacks of real incompetence by a department that should know better. it also caused severe embarrassment both to the people appointed and to the home secretary herself.

But I hope today is seen not just as an opportunity for ” yah boo” politics between Labour and the Tories but for a more reflective discussion of how we got here and what is needed to put it right.

What cannot be denied is that the home secretary did not entirely fulfil what she promised the ” magnificent seven ” MPs requested in drawing up the panel. True she did take on board their request for survivors on the panel – appointing two – Graham Wilmer, who runs the Lantern Project and Sharon Evans,  a former TV  presenter who runs a children’s charity.

But there – as far as I can find out – been no through consultation over the appointment of the two chairs of the panel involving the MPs – and there has also, to my surprise, been no internal consultation inside the home office. Frankly they should also have asked survivors groups BEFORE not AFTER the appointments.

It is probably not well-known but the home office has its own very small unit which can advise on the setting up of independent panels, who is appointed to them, and can interview suitable people to sit on them – or at least advise newly appointed secretaries to inquiries set up by other ministries on how to get going.

I understand this body was never consulted yet it can claim a track record of success. Its biggest achievement has been the Hillsborough Inquiry into the tragic deaths of Liverpool fans where it got a chairman, now the former bishop of Liverpool, to preside. None of those families of the fans would now say it didn’t get to the bottom of a grave injustice hidden for years.

Yet child abuse survivors might be surprised to know that it got the information without any statutory powers by ruthlessly pursuing the evidence and cajoling reluctant authorities to hand over  the information, including stuff that is now landing the South Yorkshire Constabulary in dire trouble.

It did have one duty  – and only one duty – to tell the families who lost loved ones at Hillsborough Stadium first what it had found out. Once it had done this it published everything as fact – and set up of a train of events – now being shown by the inquest into Hillsborough.

It is also responsible for the current Daniel Morgan murder inquiry – where I suspect but do not know the same tussle is probably going on now.

Now many of the survivors seem to want a statutory inquiry which can compel people to attend, give information,  force people to confess to crimes, with grand public hearings and a very detailed terms of reference. Be careful what you wish for.

Superficially it sounds great but there are drawbacks to this approach. Terms of reference need to be nebulous rather than specific so the panel cannot be stopped following the facts wherever it takes them – and given the wide sweep of institutions involved it needs to go to places we may not have even thought about.

Second yes statutory power sound great but there is one drawback – I am told it allows lawyers representing anybody or organisation accused by survivors to demand the status of ” an interested party”. That means anything you tell them could go straight back to their lawyers before the inquiry even reports.

If it is non statutory there is no obligation whatever to tell them anything – and their lawyers have no right to find out.

If it follows what happened in Hillsborough and in Daniel Morgan – the families are centre stage. In this case, it means the survivors are centre stage – the panel is obliged to you, you are not obliged to the panel. This means you will know first what the findings are – not the armed forces, the security services, the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, the councils, the police, schools or any other body that allowed you to be abused.

Finally I hope the panel can tell you whether they have obtained a freezing  or preservation order on all documents listing evidence or allegations of child sexual abuse. Whitehall permanent secretaries have a superb meeting and network facility – and could send out letters now banning the destruction of all documents. I would expect the Church of England – after Archbishop Welby’s words last week to do the same.

And as for a chair – whoever is appointed faces the risk of ” guilty by association ” if they worked in any organisation because of the widespread nature of child sexual abuse. It just depends on how guilty the association is and the Home Office needs to do a  better job of finding this out.